The screenshots below are from MAMP PRO 3 and PhpStorm 8. So your initial setup isn’t as frustrating as mine was, I thought I'd share how I was able to get it all wired up and hopefully save you some time. After a few days mucking with everything, I was able finally able to get it figured out. Each article seemed to be missing one key piece of the puzzle. I must have read 8 - 10 articles scattered about the internet to finally get PhpStorm setup to do debugging with Xdebug and MAMP. As an added bonus, remoteautostart also works automatically with CLI scripts. Once you have done so, Xdebug will attempt to start a remote debugging session automatically on every request without a need for special URL parameters, POST data, or cookies. Lab Exercise: Installing XAMPP and Configuring it with PhpStorm This document is a walkthrough through the process of installing and configuring XAMPP.After following all steps you will have fully configured XAMPP with PhpStorm integration. This works nicely when I start a debug session using the browser, but now we don’t use a browser and send the requests via HTTP directly (Codeception uses Guzzle for that), so we have to set the Cookie somehow. I’m assuming you have PhpStorm and Xdebug set up neat and nicely, as there are enough tutorials about it out there. To start we need to download the latest Xdebug version from You have to choose the right version for your installed php version. Setting up Xdebug and PhpStorm with XAMPP for nicer debugging With xdebug you can set breakpoints in your code, see all defined variable and even change them while running the code.